LISS.398A TECHNOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT and HUMAN ADAPTATION:
PART II PRE-EUROPEAN
Recall that the overall
cultural evolutionary perspective
that structures the material in this course.
At this point in the course we narrow our focus to three areas in Mesoamerica and begin to consider the changes in social organization
accompanying a major change in food production technology -- the adoption of agriculture and the associated settlement in fixed
locations throughout the year.
To do this in a systematic way, we need to have some vocabulary for describing different kinds of social organization. In fact, we need to
understand two different ways of describing social organization and have a rough idea of how one translates between descriptions in each
vocabulary. One vocabulary, employed in much of the reading outside the principal textbook for this part of the course (
Blanton, et. al. ‘93)
focus mainly on
The other, introduced in this text, focuses on more concrete features of
somewhat like those used in describing thermodynamic systems.
Blanton, et. al
believe that describing societies as social systems (my terminology) is more fruitful than describing them in
terms of social institutions for at least three related reasons:
Their argument for 1) and 3) is essentially the exposition in the rest of the book. However, they provide us with some concise, explicit
discussion of how they relate
archaeological data and social systems concepts.
- One is more likely to be able to develop a theory of social evolution using the social
- Social systems concepts are more directly connected with archaeological data;
- Many different configurations of social institutions are observed to occur in societies that are isomorphic
described as social systems.
Colorado School of Mines
Division of Liberal Arts and International Studies
Dr. Joseph D. Sneed